Change We Can Believe In

Since our last presentation Aaron, Leta and I have made quite a few major changes to our video project. In order to get to where we are now (done for now!) we went through even more changes.

For example, after receiving the feedback from our peers and after seeing the video in its entirety (we had not seen it played because of rendering problems) we decided that the chaos of our project was actually quite repetitive and a little boring. We figured out how to edit and playback our video in progress without having to render it, which was a huge breakthrough and turning point in the project's metamorphosis. It is much easier to edit your video, when you can actually see what you're working with (obviously).

From there, we decided to rethink everything. First, we took out the randomness of the videos popping up everywhere to try and take care of the chaos, and went back to our original idea of using three horizontal channels with the bar table a constant in the center. The audio tones were also removed and Leta was working on trying to find an actual song to play along with the piece. We began handwriting the text then taking videos of it, and thinking about what else we write on to help us remember. While we were changing the video from chaotic alien back to three channel harmony, we tried making the handwritten text videos a transparent full screen over the other channels and we really liked the aesthetic quality of the result.

The next day, I got obsessive, high jacked the hard drive with our project on it from Leta who gave me a remixed track of a Billy Holiday song and I headed to the lab. I wanted to see what it would look like if we made the whole project this kind of full screen, transparent memory collage instead of this three channel madness. Aaron and Leta were on board with this as well and after some editing of some hyper-yellow igoogle todo lists and the cutting of text, we found ourselves at a stopping point with the project.

In its current state, I believe the video and audio alone could successfully get our (as Leta put it) "thesis" across to the viewer, even without the text. That is why we cut a significant amount of text; however, I still feel that the text that exists on the transparent hand written videos adds a tension between the video and the audio and gives it a kind of narrative. The google to do list itself, which is the first text to appear in the piece acts as a different kind of memory than personal memory or relationship memory. This kind of memory is the everyday, don't forget to pay rent kind of memory. Our to do lists have language on them however, that are not often seen on to do lists and are not even tasks. These to do lists talk about the personal kinds of memory, but in a more analytical way than the hand written narrative, poetic segments do.

The collaboration continued to be interesting. I realized that I am a control freak, but then again maybe I already knew that. I hope my group understands. Also, after reading Meg's blog, I came to a realization that I think many of us did. Collaboration works best when each person has a unique role to play, like in a film production. It's strange to create something like a video project when we all have similar artistic and intellectual strengths and weaknesses. The risk for too many cooks spoiling the soup (is that the saying?) I think increases with this kind of collaborative model.

Overall, this class definitely pushed me to think about creative work in a less limited way. I have rethought what is possible for me as an artist and always lingering in the back of my mind is the challenge to catch writing up with the technological realities of our daily lives. It is exciting to study subjects and works that don't quite have a vocabulary or any way to talk about them yet. There is is such an established way to talk about writing that literary theory begins to feel rigid and tedious. I like how this new kind of art/writing not only pushes art and artists, but criticism as well.

I'm looking forward to remix!

The Memory of Space

Well I will start the progress of my video project by addressing my teammate Meg's request to discuss my experience with artistic collaboration. Although the logistics of meeting is somewhat of a challenge (we're all busy and highly interesting people) I think that my collaboration with Aaaron and Meg has (like the sound project) brought me to a place that I would have not nor could have not gotten to on my own. Meg really brought in an interesting perspective as our resident neuro science hobbyist which was a main inspiration for one of the channels we are constructing. Aaron's Hollywood cinematic acting overall badass background led us in a direction of experiments with video and narrative. I contributed the idea that I apologetically introduced as "new age touchy feely hippie" (which I hope it really isn't).

The idea started after sitting in a bar and wondering if people's conversations linger in those spaces, even after new people have replaced them in that space. Now you're probably understanding the touchy feely concern. Strangely enough, my team members thought it was an interesting enough idea to play around with in a video project.

From the beginning Meg and I wanted to do something with multiple channels and ultimately as a group we decided on three channels. The first channel starting from the left is going to be video or random (and not so random) neural connections that will be dictated by the images and conversation that occurs in the second channel (the center channel). This channel will contain video of one space occupied over time by several different people and is meant to embody this idea that space holds memory. We have not figured out whether or not we want to tell the people we are filming that they are on film. We also have thought about possibly straight up scripting the whole thing. Either way, this channel is going to occupy the space for space holding onto memory. For example, the lingering question for this channel that should arise is, if one group of people have a conversation on a subject in a given space, is it more likely that the same subject matter will come up in the same space among different people?

Finally, the third channel will contain text. This text is being as we speak collaboratively written in our shared google document and some of the language will be found (as from Pierre Nora-see below). We have been interested in some sort of loose narrative for the project and this is where the text of that narrative will unfold. Ideally, we also would like to have pop ups similar to Intervals by Peter Horvath.

During our last meeting, Meg also thought it would be interesting to layer a very transparent video over other video. This inspiration derived from Aaron using this technique in his sample project as we learned Final Cut last week. Currently we are collecting the footage and should be starting to put it all together shortly.


Works inspiring this video project:

Essays:

Pierre Nora - Between Memory and History

The following web cinema works by Peter Horvath:

TRIPTYCH: MOTION STILLNESS RESISTANCE

Boulevard

Intervals

....I will add more as I come to them!

My First Attempt at Web Cinema Writing

Web Cinema Writing? I'm not sure about that yet but it will have to work for now. The HD Flip is phenomenal and I'm having a blast with it. We are still in the brainstorming phase of our group video project but I wanted to try out the flip and see what I could come up with. It's pretty simple really, but here it is,




If you want to read the text better, here it is on Youtube (I recommend watching it in HQ and full screen):